Theatrical Joyce

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UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA FACULDADE DE LETRAS Departamento de Estudos Anglísticos

Theatrical Joyce

David Michael Greer

DOUTORAMENTO EM ESTUDOS ARTÍSTICOS ESTUDOS DE TEATRO

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UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA FACULDADE DE LETRAS Departamento de Estudos Anglísticos

Theatrical Joyce

David Michael Greer

Tese orientada por

Prof. Doutora Maria Helena Serôdio

e Dr. Sam Slote

DOUTORAMENTO EM ESTUDOS ARTÍSTICOS ESTUDOS DE TEATRO

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Abstract

As a young man, Joyce’s artistic future as a writer of prose fiction was far from decided. Although his earliest attempts at literary composition were through lyrical verse and prose sketches, his major literary ambitions as a student were focused on the theatre; and his dramatic writing and writing on drama had essentially been done before he wrote his first Dubliners’ story. The subsequent appearance of Exiles and the form of the “Circe” episode most obviously show that this early fascination never completely left him.

Through his use of dramatic techniques and ‘’hidden’ texts, Joyce reconciled his desire to create drama with the realisation that his most natural medium was narrative prose. As the dramatic came to fully inform his prose fiction, however, Joyce was able to combine and explore the full possibilities of dialogue ranging from the most artificially high-flown rhetoric to the coarsest spoken informalities.

A major feature of Joyce’s method was his readiness to adapt and parody the works of earlier authors, including dramatists. Such adaptation provided a channel for his works to flow into forms ungoverned by the demands of producing a realistic, exterior world. “Spectacular” linguistic and narrative “theatrical” effects (OCPW: 25) were generated through characters’ inner lives which, when combined with the incorporated dramatic texts, created ironies and alternative perspectives through juxtaposition and parodic subversion.

In Theatrical Joyce, I explore this influence on Joyce’s writing and the protean line of creative tension born out of his attempt to achieve a formal balance, in which boundaries are often blurred through the embedding of drama in narrative.

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Resumo

Na sua juventude, o futuro artístico de Joyce enquanto escritor estava longe de estar decidido. Apesar das primeiras tentativas de composição literária serem obras de natureza lírica e textos curtos em prosa, as suas ambições literárias enquanto estudante voltavam-se para o teatro. A escrita dramática e sobre o teatro de Joyce foi maioritariamente feita antes de escrever o primeiro conto de Dubliners. A escrita posterior de Exiles e a forma do episódio “Circe” reflectem um fascínio de juventude nunca esmoreceu completamente.

Através da utilização de técnicas dramáticas e de textos ‘escondidos’, Joyce reconciliou o desejo de criar um drama com a consciência de que o seu medium mais natural era a prosa narrativa. Contudo, à medida que o dramático informou completamente a sua ficção em prosa, Joyce conseguiu combinar e explorar as possibilidades de diálogo entre eles, indo da retórica mais artificiosa até às informalidades orais mais rudes.

Um elemento fundamental no método de Joyce foi a capacidade de adaptar e parodiar as obras de autores anteriores, incluindo dramaturgos. Esse tipo de adaptação disponibilizava um canal para a obra fluir para formas não governadas pelas exigências de produção de um mundo exterior realista. Efeitos linguísticos “espectaculares” e efeitos narrativos “teatrais” (OCPW: 25) eram gerados através das vidas interiores das personagens que, combinadas com os textos dramáticos incorporados, criaram ironias e perspectivas alternativas através da justaposição e subversão paródica.

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Em Theatrical Joyce, é explorada esta influência na escrita de Joyce e a tensão criativa que resulta da tentativa de chegar a um equilíbrio formal, em que as fronteiras são muitas vezes dissolvidas através da incorporação do drama na narrativa.

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To Paulo Eduardo Carvalho much missed friend and encourager

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Acknowledgements

My first expression of gratitude must go to Professor Maria Helena Serôdio of the Faculty of Letters, Lisbon University and Dr. Sam Slote of Trinity College, Dublin. Without their patience, wisdom and generosity, there would simply have been no

Theatrical Joyce.

I would also like to thank the Faculty of Letters, Lisbon University for granting me two invaluable years of leave to work on this thesis.

I must also express my heartfelt appreciation to Eduardo and Marília Carvalho for their wonderful generosity in allowing me to use Paulo’s extensive library; Teresa Casal for her unfailing support and friendship; and to the various members of Balloonatics Theatre Company, particularly Chris Bilton, Paul Doran and Paul O’Hanrahan, whose own Joycean odyssey inspired so much of my work.

I have been privileged to have met and learned from many wonderful teachers over the years. My special thanks, however, must go to Elizabeth Capstick, John Barber and Roger Harcourt who, long ago and quite far away, encouraged me to begin this journey.

My family has been no less important and I would like to thank my parents, Bill and Cathy Greer, and children, Bob, Willy and Maria, who have all supported and encouraged me in their own very special ways.

Finally, my thanks to Graça, “Gea-Tellus” and “wonderworker”, without whom this poor man’s Ulysses would have remained lost at sea.

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Abbreviations

Reference to the editions of works used is contained in the Bibliography. The following abbreviations of the titles are used in the text:

D Dubliners

DD The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce FW Finnegans Wake

GJ Giacomo Joyce

JJ James Joyce by Richard Ellmann LI Letters of James Joyce vol. I.

LII Letters of James Joyce vol. II and III. LIII Letters of James Joyce vol. II and III. MBK My Brother’s Keeper by Stanislaus Joyce OCPW Occasional, Critical and Political Writing P A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man PSW Poems and Shorter Writings

SH Stephen Hero SL Selected Letters U Ulysses

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“in the act of perhaps getting an intro, (…) say, (…) engaged in performing” (FW: 109)

For the artist as a young man, in the beginning was the theatre. Throughout his life, in fact, Joyce showed more interest in the theatre, in its many variations, than in the genre he was to revolutionise. His major enthusiasms were stirred by performance in all its forms: from literary theatre, to the pantomimes, musical hall, light opera and popular plays to be seen in the Dublin of the late 19th and early 20th century; as well as the various types of performance he experienced on the continent in his later years.

His early writing ambitions were a reflex of this enthusiasm. Joyce’s first published pieces were critical essays dealing exclusively with the theatre, with drama proclaimed the highest form of art. Even when writing about another artistic form in an 1899 student essay, the success of Munkacsy’s painting, Ecce Homo, was judged according to its dramatic quality.

In 1900, he began to write his ‘epiphanies’: moments of “sudden spiritual manifestation” that might appear “in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (SH: 188). Significantly, epiphanies were manifested through the spoken as well as the written word, with “the vulgarity of speech or of gesture” suggesting a clear dramatic quality balancing the often more lyrical “memorable phase of the mind”. Of the 40 that have survived – it seems there were at least 71 (PSW: 272) –, 16 are in the form of short dramatic dialogues; with the others being either monologues or prose poems.

His brother Stanislaus also tells us of the early and now lost play, A Brilliant

Career (the only piece Joyce ever dedicated to anyone – his own soul) which, it seems,

owed much to Ibsen (MBK (1958) 1982: 126-31). Although, as Ellmann suggests (JJ: 79), it might well have been “Ibcenest nansence!” (FW: 535) more than anything else, it

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was a sign of how the “old master” (OCPW: 52) was more important to Joyce in these early years than any other artist; despite some clear Wagnerian influence and the ever-present shadow of Shakespeare.

In addition to A Brilliant Career, and the two translations of Hauptmann intended for the Abbey, there was the intriguingly titled verse play, Dream Stuff. Judging, however, from the one stanza that has survived, Dream Stuff was more in line with his Symbolist-influenced Chamber Music than an independently Joycean dramatic departure. Any reader hoping to catch an early glimpse of Finnegans Wake would, it seems, have certainly been disappointed.

At the same time as his frequent student trips to popular theatre and the music hall where, like Stephen Dedalus “in the gallery of the Gaiety”, he “had become a constant ‘god’” (SH: 36), Joyce was cultivating his role as the solitary artist. Even though Ibsen was actually much discussed in late 19th century Irish literary circles, Joyce the student liked to present himself as the lone crusader in the Norwegian’s cause, and adopted him as his model; possibly as much for the characteristics of his personality, manner and life, as for the content of his plays. Due to the almost complete absence of Ibsen from the Dublin stage – if not literary conversation – during these vital years, however, Joyce’s experience of the dramatist was primarily as a reader.

As mentioned above, another formative influence in these years was Wagner. Joyce’s contact with the German composer, as with the Norwegian dramatist, was more as a reader (of both his libretti and critical theory) than an audience member. Although there was plenty of Italian opera, with its focus on music rather than drama, the global spectacle of Wagnerian opera was never performed in Dublin during Joyce’s youth, with only evenings of excerpts being offered to audiences.

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This early exposure to serious drama in various forms (Wagner, of course, called his works ‘dramas’) being primarily on the page rather than seen on the stage was to have a lasting effect on Joyce’s art. Serious drama for Joyce, therefore, (whether literary or musical, as most deeply experienced through Ibsen and Wagner) was unconsciously fixed as a text to be read, with its effects experienced primarily by readers rather than by an audience. With these first and defining contacts therefore being effectively with literary texts rather than performances in theatres, Joyce came to consider staging and theatre technique as secondary issues; with the practicalities of literary theatre largely eluding him.

For the pantomimes and similar popular performances at the Gaiety and Dan Lowry’s Music Hall, however, these ‘secondary issues’ were of paramount importance; but with a significant difference. Unlike the literary form, popular theatre, with its broader conventions and an audience perhaps more open to change and surprise, could stage virtually whatever it wanted and however it liked, without the constraints of realism. Content, however, was far from being insignificant; and in what perhaps was more than a glib throwaway line, Joyce claimed that “the music-hall, not poetry, was a criticism of life” (MBK (1958) 1982: 110). His enjoyment of such popular forms, free from the responsibilities of realism, continued throughout his life.

Most of Joyce’s literary theories (as put forward in the early articles and papers) centred on the realistic drama as developed by Ibsen. These theories did not, however, ultimately represent Joyce’s carefully formulated thinking about a literary genre but rather served to justify and rationalise his personal attraction to a specific artist. These distinct artistic inclinations created a central conflict in Joyce’s relationship with the theatre. Despite his intellectual commitment to Ibsen and the kind of drama he stood for, Joyce had little practical understanding of, or emotional drive to create realistic

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drama; Ibsenite or otherwise. If A Brilliant Career and, to a lesser extent, Exiles is evidence of this disinclination, “Circe” particularly can be seen as the bringing together of the spectacular theatrical forms – more ‘popular’, but also more Wagnerian than Ibsenite in its ‘global’ nature – that intrigued and delighted Joyce. After initially suffering from the same kind of misdirection he ironically identified in the young Ibsen: “an original and capable writer struggling with a form that is not his own” (OCPW: 73), Joyce found release in a concept of drama allowing him to use “the spectacular and the theatrical” (OCPW: 25) effects he was attracted to; and without being confined to a form which, despite his supporting it on principle, was essentially at odds with his basic creative inclinations. When released from the constraints of actual staging, or literal theatrical representation, he could employ the dramatic, and exploit the resultant formal tension, within the pages of an ostensibly narrative text.

Referring to Joyce’s early paper, “Drama and Life”, Richard Ellmann argued that “the exaltation of drama above all other forms was to be reformulated later in his aesthetic system and, if he published only one play, he kept to his principles by making all his novels dramatic” (JJ: 73). In Theatrical Joyce, my aim will be to explore how this theatrical influence had a central effect on Joyce’s writing and led to a creative tension running through his work between dramatic instinct and an equally inherent desire to explore the diverse possibilities of narrative form. This thesis is based on the study of several texts which, I believe, best (but not exclusively) illustrate this tension.

My first chapter, “The Play’s the Thing”, explores in greater detail how Joyce’s interest in theatre influenced his early growth as an artist. After discussing his own early performances (in domestic settings or on the amateur stage),the chapter goes on to examine his critical writings.

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Considering its brevity, none of Joyce’s works are more allusive than Giacomo

Joyce. Written at a time in which he was working on A Portrait, Exiles and Ulysses

almost in tandem, Giacomo draws us into a search for the theatrical within the narrative as the nature of the protagonist’s relationship with his girl student is explored through juxtaposition with a range of allusions from the world stage and, in particular, the ironic framing of the relationship within the five act structure of Hamlet.

The chapter on Joyce’s one published play, Exiles, examines the conflict between the text’s various moments of clear theatricality, through its use of Shakespeare and several dramatic genres, as well as the characters’ seeming inclination to present themselves as if they belonged within an essentially novelistic narrative form. Their attempt to subjugate actions to words, or drama to narrative, illuminates the author’s struggle between self-conscious adherence to Ibsenite dramatic theory and a natural instinct for parallelism and parody through theatrical spectacle.

“Preparatory to anything else” serves as an introduction to my study of selected episodes from the “Blue Book of Eccles” (FW: 179). I introduce the argument that

Ulysses not only makes frequent use of techniques more conventionally associated with

the drama than the novel, but that it also echoes, through parallelism and parody, various theatrical genres and even specific plays. In “Telemachus”, “Cyclops”, “The Oxen of the Sun”, “Circe”, and “Penelope”, significantly diverse and developing lines of tension between narrative and drama are explored. Each of the five chosen episodes applies specific dramatic techniques, and/or incorporates aspects of existing plays by which they turn themselves – partly or wholly – into new, quasi-dramatic texts.

In “‘Telemachus’: Staged Irishmen”, I examine the struggle of the narrative mode to deal with the usurping ambitions of drama through a number of techniques, which include the subversive use of two dramatic texts: Hamlet and Cathleen ni Houlihan. The

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use of Irish myth in the latter and the ‘classic’, near mythical status of the Shakespeare establish an ironic perspective on various beliefs and events staged at the Martello tower.

The “Cyclops” episode sees the gigantic ‘I’ of the realistic dramatic monologue struggling with a plethora of protean narrative parodies. These parodies, or narrative interruptions, rival the monologist’s dominance in the chapter, as well as mocking the story he is attempting to tell. Joyce’s early rejection of Greek dramatic “laws” (OCPW: 23) is underlined through the chapter’s partial parody of the choric figure who, traditionally, reports on actions the audience never see performed. Following “Telemachus” in this sense, “Cyclops” sets up a debate between narrative and drama on various levels; and, as with the earlier episode, a dramatic text – in this case, Shelley’s translation of Euripides’ The Cyclops (which has already established its own dialogue with the epic original) – joins Homer in presenting an ironic background to events in Joyce’s Dublin.

After examining the connection between character roles and the shape-shifting narrative performance in “The Oxen of the Sun”, “Shouts in the Street” moves into a different area: dramatisation. The coda of “Oxen” moves the episode from narrative to drama: while the look of the text on the page suggests chaotic colloquial narrative; the sound suggests demotic dramatic dialogue. Acting on this, and adopting a different approach for so different an episode, I have attempted to rewrite the coda as a dramatic script by allocating speeches to various named as well as unnamed characters.

With “Circe” being the chapter in which so many themes in Ulysses come to a head, the Nighttown episode suddenly transforms the novel into what seems like a play, staging the climax of the struggle between drama and narrative. As if complementing the earlier performance in Giacomo Joyce, Hamlet again provides a parodic framework

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for this struggle of forms and subconscious release in “Circe” within the five act Shakespearean structure.

Joyce appropriated Hamlet in various ways in his work, in terms of both form and content. The final chapter of Ulysses is entirely given over to what is perhaps the most significant of the prince’s dramatic techniques: the soliloquy. Or is it a soliloquy? Should Molly’s speech more properly be called a monologue? If so, what is the significance of this distinction?1

After briefly discussing the implications of the two forms in terms of audience, the chapter goes on to explore Molly’s role as both narrator and performer; as narrative and the dramatic merge in an episode with no recourse to the theatrical parody or parallelism we have grown used to over our long day in Dublin.

1

With ‘monologue’ coming from the Greek and soliloquy from the Latin, is distinction simply a matter of derivation? Based on definitions provided by Patrice Pavis (Pavis 1998: 218, 342), these terms are discussed in chapter 4.5, “Penelope”: The Star Turn.

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1. The Play’s the Thing

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As a young child, James Joyce certainly knew how to make an entrance: “Here’s me! “Here’s me!” he would announce all the way down the stairs to the whole house “at dessert-time” (MBK (1958) 1982: 30). Indeed, My Brother’s Keeper, Stanislaus’ unfinished biography of his brother, begins with his memory of a childhood “dramatic performance” put on for their parents and nurse-maid “of the story of Adam and Eve”, in which Jim “was the Devil (…) wriggling across the floor with a tail probably made up of a rolled-up sheet or towel (…) with his instinctive realisation (…) that the most important part dramatically, which he reserved for himself, was that of the Tempter” (MBK (1958) 1982: 27).

Joyce’s interest in performing continued at school and, in May 1898, his last year at Belvedere College, he appeared as the “thrash happy” headmaster, Dr. Grimstone, in F. J. Anstey’s farce, Vice Versa2, with Stanislaus giving him a good review:

He was quite deliberate and self-possessed on the stage, showing a surprising talent for acting, and added an unexpected interest to the part by improvising, to the coach’s horror, an excellent imitation of the rector of the College [who] seemed to enjoy it as much as his pupils among the audience did (MBK (1958) 1982: 102)3.

2

Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers is a by (Thomas Anstey Guthrie), first published in 1882. Joyce would have performed in the stage version, published in 1883, by Edward Rose.

novel F. Anstey

The plot runs as follows: Victorian business man, Paul Bultitude is sending his son Dick off to

. The school is run by the fearsome , Dr. Grimstone. Bultitude, trying to calm his son’s fears says that schooldays are the best years of a boy's life, and that he wishes he was in Dick’s position. Thanks to the magic “Garuda Stone”, bought back from India by Dick’s Uncle, father and son change places. Mr. Bultitude goes off to boarding school in his son's body, while Dick gets a chance to run Bultitude’s business. After various adventures, they return to normal but with a greater understanding of each other’s lives (Novel accessed at Project Gutenberg).

boarding

school headmaster

Joyce’s long-term interest in the theme of father-son relationships, already strongly present due to his own domestic difficulties, would have been further nurtured by this farce.

3

In “Circe”, Bloom remembers a cross dressing performance in a production of Vice Versa as a boy (U: 648-9).

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Ellmann tells us that other schoolboys, aware both of his rather rebellious tendencies and talent for mimicry, had put him up to this (JJ: 56)4. Classic texts, even those dear to Joyce, were no safer from the manic parodies of his youth during Sunday evening japes in various homes. C. P. Curran has “painful recollections of [himself] as Master Builder Solness falling down the front of the house through rose bushes and thorns past the window of the drawing-room where the audience were, while [a female friend] sang of harps in the air” (Curran 1968: 22).

Another friend, Eugene Sheehy, tells the story of William Fallon strewing the floor with vegetables as mad Ophelia, while Joyce, as Gertrude, “performed all the motions of a woman ‘keening’ at an Irish wake in the very ecstasy of grief” (Sheehy (1967) 2004: 28). Stanislaus also testifies to his qualities as a comedian during evenings of charades at the Sheehys5, when “Jim could keep people in fits of laughter with his dumbshow (...) always at an imbecile level”. He adds, however, that “except during these light-hearted evenings (…) he did not indulge this vein” (MBK (1958) 1982: 122). In the light of such comic dumbshows, it is no surprise that Joyce appeared in Margaret Sheehy’s one-act comedy Cupid’s Confidante. It had been put together at first by a group of friends for a Grafton St. café performance on 21st March, 1900, but was later revived, with Joyce now in the cast, at the more prestigious venue of the Antient Concert Rooms on 8th January, 1901 (less than two weeks before he delivered his paper “Drama and Life” to the university’s Literary and Historical Society). One of the author’s descendants, Andrée D. Sheehy Skeffington has called it “a very slight amateur’s playlet” (Skeffington 1984: 205) and Stanislaus, judging by his manner of

4

This encouragement later found its way into his fiction, although the actual imitation is not reproduced (P: 69-70, 79).

5

Such evenings are described in Stephen Hero, in which the Sheehys appear as the ‘Daniels’. On one occasion, Joyce was given ‘Ibsen’ to guess during a game of Who’s Who?” (SH: 45-6).

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replacing the character’s names with archetypes in his summary6, was of a similar opinion. He was, nevertheless, impressed once more by his brother’s performance. He tells us:

[Joyce] played the leading male part (…) a rake and an adventurer (…) Jim, who often found relief for his feelings in stark English, said that even the virgin cheeks of his arse blushed for his part in it. It certainly did not seem so. He appeared to be quite unconcerned as if he were acting in a more elaborate kind of charade. [In spite of Joyce’s] inexperience of life (…) he acted exceedingly well the part of a handsome, polished, adroit, irresistible man of the world (MBK (1958) 1982: 134).

He also seems to have taken advantage of a comic opportunity that came his way. At a time when Irish nationalists were encouraging the population to support the domestic market (and this was around eight months before Joyce’s less than nationalistic piece, “The Day of the Rabblement”), one of the highlights of his performance seems to have been when, unable to light a match, Joyce ad libbed: “Damn these Irish matches!” (JJ: 93).

A review appeared in the Freeman’s Journal on 9th January 1901, praising Joyce’s work as “a revelation of amateur acting” and that “he followed with extraordinary skill” the methods of “Robertson of ‘Hawtree’ fame”. Joyce apparently kept the clipping for years afterwards (JJ: 93).

By the time he performed in Cupid’s Confidante, Joyce had written his first play,

A Brilliant Career, and had it politely and constructively rejected by the drama critic

and Ibsen translator, William Archer. Archer’s letter made Joyce “aware of many

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“Geoffrey Fortescue, a rake and an adventurer, is paying his addresses to a wealthy girl, but just when he seems to be in the straight and winning comfortably, because Sweet Innocence has quarrelled with her True Lover, he is jockeyed out of position by the girl friend of Sweet Innocence, Cupid’s Confidante (played by the authoress). She beguiles the rake into making love to her and unmasks his villainy. The True Lover is recalled from an imminent voyage to the antipodes, and all ends well” (MBK (1958) 1982: 134).

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deficiencies, for he thought seriously of abandoning his university studies and going on the stage in order to gain a practical knowledge of the production of dramatic works.” He sometimes took The Stage and had already come up with ‘Gordon Brown’, as his stage name, after Giordano Bruno, whose essays he was reading at that time (MBK (1958) 1982: 132).

Although Cupid’s Confidante seems about as far from the Ibsenite drama he was championing and trying to write at the time as could be imagined, there had obviously been something in his performance to remind the reviewer of Caste (first performed in 1867)7. As if acting on this hint, Cupid’s Confidante was followed, “one Christmas” (MBK (1958) 1982: 123; JJ: 93) at the Sheehys, by Joyce actually playing Capt. Hawtree in Thomas William Robertson’s, Caste. Stanislaus was impressed that ‘Jim’ did it “without making the part a caricature of military stiffness” (MBK (1958) 1982: 123).

On 7th May 1910, The New York Dramatic Mirror wrote on a revival of Caste, which opened at the Empire Theatre, New York, on 25 April 1910th :

A play of modern life that has outstripped two-score years can hardly be up to the fashion of to-day, any more than a bonnet of the vintage of the Civil War period. The little domestic story of the modernized Prince Charming, who in the person of the Hon. George D'Alroy throws caste to the wind and makes the daughter of a hopeless old inebriate and labor agitator his wife, is indeed little more than an infusion of weak tea to a sophisticated public which knows its Ibsen and Pinero.

Whilst not holding them remotely in the same esteem8, Joyce certainly knew both authors and his contemporary theatre. Caste may have been somewhat dated by the end

7

Performed professionally in Dublin in October 1898 and July 1900 (Watt 1991: 205, 215), it is quite possible that Joyce saw one or even both productions.

8

When W. L. Courtney wrote to accept “Ibsen’s New Drama” for The Fortnightly Review, he asked that “a derogatory reference” to Pinero be cut, which Joyce did (JJ: 74).

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of the century9, but aspects of Robertson’s plays were very much in keeping with what he admired in the contemporary realistic drama of both Ibsen and Hauptmann:

While he drew heavily on the established Victorian predilection for realistic stage effects and scenery, Robertson rejected the mannered acting that often accompanied it. [His plays have] precise stage directions which insist on naturalness and, in Victorian terms, an effacing anti-theatricality. His style of drama was to earn the nickname of ‘cup and saucer comedy’ after a scene set in the kitchen in Caste (Hudston 2000: 225)10.

If there was a review of Joyce’s performance in Caste, it has not survived and, as for ‘Gordon Brown’, as far as we know he was left waiting in the wings. Joyce’s acting career came to a close apparently, and unlikely as it seems, in the role of a British soldier.

In addition to his own accomplished performances (a skill inherited from his father)11, Joyce was an enthusiastic audience member who “went to the theatre as regularly as he could afford it” (JJ: 54). Stanislaus remembers him spending some of his “Preparatory Grade” exhibition money on “frequent visits (…) to the cheaper parts of

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Yeats, however, was certainly unenthusiastic about the play, arguing that it “had not characters of any kind, being vague ideals, perfection as it is imagined by a common-place mind” with the audience being able to sympathise with them easily “without the labour that comes from awakening knowledge”. Despite deserving some small credit for “putting what seemed to be average common life and average common speech for the first time upon the stage in England”, Yeats felt Robertson had “made his revolution superficially” and that it was “in other countries” that the “intellectual drama of real life” had been created, of which Ibsen’s later plays [were] the real fruit” (Yeats 1905: 7, 10).

10

Robertson, to some extent, can be credited with anticipating the realism of ‘kitchen sink drama’ in British theatre of the late 1950s.

11

Stanislaus writes that “it was in university theatricals [at Queen’s College, Cork] that [his father] chiefly distinguished himself. I have seen a dozen or so cuttings from Cork daily papers containing flattering notices of Mr. Joyce’s performances in various comic parts. Out of vanity he preserved them for years” (MBK (1958) 1982: 45-6). One of the attributes of Stephen’s father listed to Cranly is “amateur actor” (P: 217).

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theatres” with the family to see comedies or, “if tickets could be had”, Henry Irving or Beerbohm Tree (MBK (1958) 1982: 77)12.

It seems he also became, like Stephen, “a constant ‘god’” at the Gaiety Theatre (SH: 36) where, as a 9 year old, he may well have seen the pantomime, Sinbad the

Sailor which he used, most notably of course, at the close of the “Ithaca” (U: 871).

Joyce went to see music hall and musical comedies, “which had names like The Gaiety

Girl, The Circus Girl, The Singhalee.” They “exercised only a passing attraction on him

for a year or two” although “he found the frank vulgarity of the music hall less offensive than the falsity of most of the legitimate drama of his day: Jones, Pinero (…) and, most of all, Shaw” (MBK (1958) 1982: 125). Joyce had his preferences; and he arrived at them by accumulating as much first-hand experience as was possible under his financial circumstances in the Dublin of that time.

Being paid for “Ibsen’s New Drama”, his review of When We Dead Awaken, in 1900 helped to broaden those horizons. He took a trip to London with his father, where they went to “theatres and music-halls, then in their heyday” and “my brother declared that the music-hall, not poetry, was a criticism of life” (MBK (1958) 1982: 110)13. Nevertheless, the Ibsen review fee also paid for a copy of D’Annunzio’s plays and poems, as well as French translations of some Sudermann plays and Maeterlinck in the original (MBK (1958) 1982: 111-2).

My aim in this chapter will be to examine how this interest in theatre, in all its forms, influenced Joyce’s early development; especially in terms of the tensions between instinct and theory that these various and often contrasting influences created

12

Similar trips, but to the ‘light’ theatre of Ingomar or The Lady of Lyons, take place in A Portrait (P: 90).

13

In Stanislaus’ diary entry for 3 April 1904, we also find that “Jim considers the music-hall, not Poetry, a criticism on life” (DD: 38).

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in his critical writings. Theatre, whether literary or popular, was a major and life-long source of fascination for Joyce; much more so than the prose fiction of his contemporaries, it seems. One of the possibly surprising things revealed by the biographical material is, despite being one of the 20th century novel’s major revolutionary figures, how little Joyce was interested in the genre as practised by other writers. Over the years, letters and reported conversations rarely contain more than passing references to or fleeting comments on the novel as a genre or on other fiction writers. Despite being, it seems, a voracious reader of fiction – he claimed to Budgen that he “had read every line of” Defoe and Flaubert (Budgen, (1934) 1960: 181), as well as all Ibsen and Ben Jonson) – this reading was generally widespread and an enthusiasm for a particular writer generally seemed to be quite short-lived. A teenage interest in Thomas Hardy (JJ: 53), for example, soon transformed into complaints about the author’s “incredible woodenness” (MBK (1958) 1982: 68), and the “sciolism” of his “psychological studies” when compared to Ibsen (OCPW: 46). By 1906, he was announcing to Stanislaus that “[w]ithout boasting I think I have little or nothing to learn from English novelists” (SL: 124).14

Non-English fiction writers seemed to fare considerably better under the Joycean critical eye. He always acknowledged D’Annunzio as an influence and, as a 19 year old, praised Il Fuoco (The Flame of Life) (1900) as “the highest achievement of the novel to date”.15 Nevertheless, he seems to have been even more struck by his plays16

14

In 1928, Joyce, almost too graciously, declined to contribute to a special issue of the Revue Nouvelle on Thomas Hardy, saying that he had read the novels so long ago that “it would be singularly audacious for me to render the least judgement upon the venerable figure who has just disappeared”. (SL: 329).

15

The fact that Il Fuoco was on the Vatican Index of Prohibited Books would only have enhanced its appeal for young Joyce. When “The Day of the Rabblement” was rejected by St. Stephen’s, the university magazine, C. P. Curran remembers being told that “the rejection turned on a single point – the reference to D’Annunzio’s Il Fuoco” (Curran 1968: 20).

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(especially as performed by Eleanora Duse17). His admiration for Tolstoy’s fiction, however, was lasting. At 23, he had claimed “Tolstoy is a magnificent writer. He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!18 He is head and shoulders over the others”19 (SL: 73). In 1935, he sent his daughter Lucia “volumes” by Tolstoy; telling her that “[i]n my opinion How Much Land Does a Man Need [sic] is the greatest story the literature of the world knows” (SL: 372). Such enthusiasm, however, was of a different order to his admiration for Ibsen and Hauptmann, and his ambivalent obsession with Shakespeare, as shown by his early critical and artistic ambitions.

A sense of the dramatic was evident even in his first attempts at the short story “at school” in the mid-1890s (MBK (1958) 1982: 74). Stanislaus records one of the now lost prose sketches that made up what the schoolboy Joyce called Silhouettes:

[The narrator’s] attention is attracted by two figures in violent agitation on a lowered window-blind illuminated from within, the burly figure of a man, staggering and threatening with upraised fist, and the smaller sharp-faced figure of a nagging woman. A blow is struck and the light goes out. The narrator waits to see if anything happens afterwards. Yes, the window-blind is illuminated again dimly, (…) and the woman’s sharp profile appears accompanied by two small heads, just above the window-ledge, of children wakened by the noise. The woman’s finger is pointed in warning. She is saying, ‘Don’t waken Pa’ (MBK (1958) 1982: 104).

The realism obviously looks towards Dubliners but the scene is purely dramatic, with the narrator as the literal audience for the grim shadow puppetry. Silhouettes seems 16

Although Vicki Mahaffey does make a convincing case for the importance of D’Annunzio’s novel, Il

trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death) in Exiles (Mahaffey 1990: 206-7).

17

After seeing the actress in London, in 1900, in La Gioconda and La Città Morta (The Dead City), Joyce “wrote her an encomiastic poem which she did not acknowledge” (JJ: 77).

18

This was a source of praise already discussed in “Drama and Life” (OCPW: 25). Joyce’s personal debate concerning the ‘theatrical’ would later reappear, most conspicuously but not exclusively in Exiles and “Circe”.

19

Joyce also used the phrase to express his belief in Ibsen’s superiority to Shakespeare when interviewed by Ole Vinding in Copenhagen, 1936 (JJ: 694).

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to have come to nothing but, in 1900, he began to write his ‘epiphanies’20, which are often similar in tone to what Stanislaus remembers of the earlier prose sketches. Of the 40 that have survived, 16 are short dramatic dialogues. As for the remainder, and though the distinction is not always completely clear, 12 could be classed as monologues in which a meditating ‘I’ expresses some “memorable phase of the mind” (SH: 188) with dramatic force. The remaining 12 belong more to the category of descriptive prose poems.

Bearing in mind Joyce’s main artistic inclination at the time, it is hardly surprising that the episode (he calls it a “triviality”) in Eccles St21 giving Stephen the idea of collecting such examples of “sudden spiritual manifestation” (Ibid.: 188) had a clearly dramatic quality in its “vulgarity of speech or of gesture” (Ibid.: 188):

A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area.22 Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

THE YOUNG LADY: (drawling discreetly) ... O, yes ... I was ... at the ... cha ... pel ... THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN: (inaudibly) ... I ... (again inaudibly) ... I ...

THE YOUNG LADY: (softly) ... O ... but you're ... ve ... ry ... wick ... ed … (Ibid.: 188).

Epiphany 36 was a “literary treatment” (MBK (1958) 1982: 137) of a dream Joyce apparently had. The monologist talks about an old man “in a coat with tails and an old-fashioned high hat. (…) My goodness! how small he is! He must be very old and vain

20

These “manifestations and revelations [were] brief sketches[,] very accurately observed and noted (…) which served him as a sketch-book serves an artist” (MBK (1958) 1982: 134-5). See also Stephen’s definition of these “sudden spiritual manifestation[s]” (SH: 188).

21

The significance of the episode may well have been a contributory influence to Joyce deciding to house Bloom in the same street.

22

The setting for the Silhouettes sketches was “a row of mean little houses along which the narrator passes after nightfall” (MBK (1958) 1982: 104).

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… Maybe he isn't what I... (…) But then he’s the greatest man in the world” (PSW: 196). The old man was Ibsen. No precise dates for the writing of individual epiphanies is available, but as Stanislaus discusses the above immediately before turning to Joyce’s ‘Ibsen Night’, when he delivered his paper “Drama and Life”, it seems reasonable to assume that the epiphany was written around the same time, in 1900. In moving from epiphany to revelation, Stanislaus records that in the late 1890s:

[Joyce] came under what was to prove one of the dominant influences of his life, the influence of Henrik Ibsen. (…) One afternoon comes back to me distinctly, the afternoon when Ibsen’s The Master Builder arrived from Heinemann’s in William Archer’s translation (…) with a vignette of Hilde Wangel, alpenstock in hand, on the outside. It was an event: my brother stayed up that night to read the play. [He] had been keeping vigil to hear the message from Norway of the younger generation that sooner or later comes knocking at the door23 (MBK (1958) 1982: 98-9).

To remove any possibly doubts concerning the importance of “the old Norse poet”, Stanislaus goes on to tell us that in 1898, his last year at Belvedere College:

[Jim] was seized by an overwhelming admiration for Ibsen that was like a sudden wind in the sails of a becalmed yacht, like a rudder to a drifting bark. The other influences he had felt, though he had accepted them, had been imposed; this arose within him, keen and exultant, as if in answer to a call (MBK (1958) 1982: 101-2).

Joyce himself corroborates and elaborates upon this in a passage from Stephen Hero: [A]t this time [1898-99] Stephen suffered the most enduring influence of his life. [He] encountered through the medium of hardly procured translations the spirit of Ibsen. He understood that spirit instantly (…) Ibsen had no need of apologist or critic: the minds of the old Norse poet and of the perturbed young Celt met in a moment of radiant simultaneity. Stephen was captivated first by the excellence of the art: he was not long before he began to affirm, out of a sufficiently scanty knowledge of the tract, of course, that Ibsen was the first among the dramatists of the world.

23

Stanislaus uses Joyce’s closing words in “The Day of the Rabblement” (OCPW: 52) which, in turn, were a deliberate echo of Solness’ reaction to the prospect of young architects coming to “thunder” at his door in The Master Builder (Ibsen (1892) 1907: 252).

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Stephen continues with a description of Ibsen’s character that strongly suggests the nature of the attraction was based on seeing in the dramatist what he wanted to see in himself:

It was the very spirit of Ibsen himself that was discerned moving behind the impersonal manner of the artist:24 a mind of sincere and boylike bravery, of disillusioned pride, of minute and wilful energy (…) a human personality had been found united with an artistic manner which was itself almost a natural phenomenon” (SH: 41-2)25.

With no mention here of Ibsen’s scandalising middle class audiences around Western Europe with his attacks on their traditional values,26 it is tempting to see the young, rebellious Joyce looking for his own reflection in the Ibsenite mirror. In line with his view of Ibsen (and himself) as the solitary artist-hero, his alter-ego Stephen “solemnly” tells his brother Maurice (Stanislaus) that “[i]solation is the first principle of artistic economy” (SH: 34).

In the light of their complex future relationship, it is ironic that Yeats should have given Joyce his first opportunity to put his Ibsenite stance into some sort of practice. Although “if tickets could be had” was an issue once again, Joyce was in the gallery when the Irish Literary Theatre opened at the Dublin Antient Concert Rooms on 8th

24

The original passage after the colon was “Ibsen with his profound self-approval, Ibsen with his haughty, disillusioned courage, Ibsen with his minute and wilful energy”. Joyce’s changes certainly give a more sympathetic view of the dramatist, helped also by the (somewhat) less heavily rhetorical style.

25

C. P. Curran wrote that “Joyce’s delivery is clear in my memory. He spoke in a withdrawn, impersonal way; his clear enunciation, staccato, even metallic at times; his voice impassive and very deliberate as if coming from some cold and distant oracle.” It reminds him of the “strange impersonal voice (…) insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness” (D: 102) of Mr Duffy in “A Painful Case” (Curran 1968: 13). In Paris, however, Sylvia Beach remembers that “Joyce’s voice, with its sweet tones pitched like a tenor’s, charmed me.” She nevertheless echoes Curran in stating that his “enunciation was exceptionally clear. (…) He expressed himself quite simply but (…) with a care for the words and the sounds” (Beach (1956) 1991: 36).

26

Although, when reviewing a French translation of Ibsen’s early play, Catilina, in March 1903, Joyce does refer to the “breaking-up of tradition, which is the work of the modern era”, he is focussing more on artistic than social tradition (OCPW: 72).

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May 1899, with The Heather Field and The Countess Cathleen. The latter had already been attacked, on grounds of blasphemy, in the pamphlet “Souls for Gold! Pseudo-Celtic Drama in Dublin”,27 and a further objection was made shortly after the opening “in the name and for the honour of Dublin Catholic students of the Royal University [University College Dublin today]” which claimed that “[t]he subject is not Irish. It has been shown that the plot is founded on a German legend. The characters are ludicrous travesties of the Irish Catholic Celt [and the play] offers as a type of our people a loathsome brood of apostate.”28

Opposition such as religion and nationalism was ideal for the young Ibsenite eager to spread his wings; and Joyce was a member of the first night audience along with “a few enthusiasts” (JJ: 67), clapping “vigorously” as a larger, mainly student group booed what they considered unpatriotic passages29. It is not by accident that his later refusal to sign a student petition against the play is praised by Stanislaus in Ibsenite terms. Like “hearty” Dr Stockmann in An Enemy of the People, Joyce, apparently, “was beginning

27

“A writer [F. Hugh O’Donnell] who had a political quarrel with Mr. Yeats sent out a pamphlet in which he attacked The Countess Cathleen, on the grounds of religious unorthodoxy. The plot of the play, taken from an old legend, is this: during a famine in Ireland some starving country people, having been tempted by demons dressed as merchants to sell their souls for money that their bodies may be saved from perishing, the Countess Cathleen sells her own soul to redeem theirs, and dies. The accusation made was that it was a libel on the people of Ireland to say they could under any circumstances consent to sell their souls and that it was a libel on the demons that they counted the soul of a countess of more worth than those of the poor. At Cathleen's death the play tells us, "God looks on the intention, not the deed," and so she is forgiven at the last and taken into Heaven; and this it was said is against the teaching of the Church” (Gregory 1913: 20-21).

28

Published in the Freeman’s Journal, 10 May 1899 and qth uoted in JJ: 753-4.

29

In A Portrait, Stephen is portrayed as “alone at the side of the balcony, looking out of jaded eyes at the culture of Dublin in the stalls and at the tawdry scene-cloths and human dolls framed by the garish lamps of the stage. (…) The catcalls and hisses and mocking cries ran in rude gusts round the hall from his scattered fellow students” (P: 204).

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to experience (…) that the strongest man is he who stands most alone” (MBK (1958) 1982): 108)30.

One of the clearest manifestations of this cultivated isolation was precisely the pose that he, alone in Irish academia, was championing Ibsen. Indeed on 7th March 1901, he wrote to the dramatist on his 73rd birthday (in Dano-Norwegian, also making an English version, which he kept and which alone has survived) saying that “I have sounded your name defiantly through a college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama” (SL: 6-7).31

Stanislaus, attempting to bolster his brother’s implicit claim to be the lone champion of the dramatist, writes that on his ‘Ibsen Night’, when he delivered his paper “Drama and Life” at the university, “Ibsen was so little known then in Dublin’s minor centre of culture” that when Joyce joked that he wanted Henrik Ibsen to preside at his reading, the Society’s secretary “politely asked for his address. He had scribbled on his writing-pad the name ‘Henry Gibson’” (MBK (1958) 1982): 137). Joyce was, undoubtedly, delighted.

Even acknowledging that Joyce only refers to “a college” (rather than ‘a city’ or ‘country’) as the setting for his evangelism – and admitting that student society secretaries there might not have devoted their full attention to the debates on literary

30

Apart from giving him the satisfaction of feeling he had consolidated his ‘anti-rabblement’ position, the play also introduced Joyce to the lyric “Who Goes with Fergus?” which he later set to music and played on the piano to his dying brother, ‘Georgie’ (MBK (1958) 1982: 143). In Ulysses, it is the song Stephen sang to his mother on her death bed and which haunts him throughout the day.

31

In Stephen Hero, Ibsen is also presented as being a mysterious, threateningly exotic and probably banned figure to other students. Through Stephen’s influence, however, they gradually “were somewhat impressed: many now began to say that though Ibsen was immoral he was a great writer and one of the professors was heard to say that when he was in Berlin last summer on his holidays there had been a great deal of talk about some play of Ibsen’s which was being performed at one of the theatres” (SH: 42).

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theatre at the time – the evidence against Joyce’s implied isolation as an Ibsenite is conclusive.

In May 1899, in other words, two years before the birthday letter to Ibsen, the first issue of Beltaine, the official organ of the Irish Literary Theatre had a five page essay by C. H. Herford reprinted from the Daily Express on “The Scandinavian Dramatists”. In his essay, Herford argued that “the extraordinary vogue of Norwegian drama” was mainly due to “Norway’s dramatist of extraordinary power”, Henrik Ibsen (Herford (1899) 1970: 14)32. In the same issue, Yeats ridiculed those who considered Ibsen “immoral” (Yeats (1900) 1970: 20) and, in Beltaine No. 2 (February, 1900), George Moore proposed that “a European masterpiece like [Hedda Gabler] be produced every autumn” (Moore (1900) 1970: 10).

Even Synge, the least likely Ibsenite of the Irish Literary Theatre (after, perhaps, Lady Gregory) had first read the “joyless and pallid works”33 of the Norwegian (in German it seems) in Oberwerth in the 1880s during, in the words of Edmund Gosse, “a regular Ibsen boom”34. W. J. McCormack has also explored Synge’s early play When

the Moon Has Set (“underway by the mid-1890s” but unpublished in his lifetime) “as a

rewriting of Ibsen’s Ghosts” (McCormack 2000: 420).

The minutes of an Irish Literary Society meeting at which Yeats gave a lecture, in 1899, record his support for Ibsen and Bjornson in their attempts to establish a new type of theatre:

32

Herford, a Professor of English at Manchester University, translated Brand (1894) and Love’s Comedy (1900). No evidence exists that Joyce had copies of these translations but he may well have seen them and they could, along with William Archer’s, have figured among Stephen’s (or Joyce’s) “hardly procured translations” of the dramatist (SH: 41).

33

Preface to The Playboy of the Western World (Synge (1907) 1958: 108).

34

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The theatre of Scandinavia was the nearest approach to an ideal theatre in modern Europe. It was the only theatre whose plays were at once literary and popular (…) Ibsen and Bjornson respectively vice-president and president of the Scandinavian Society, a Society with the same objects as the society he was now addressing, warred against the cosmopolitan drama.35

He might have felt that his words came back to haunt him somewhat, when rather ruefully commenting that The Heather Field, Edward Martyn’s play at the Irish Literary Theatre: “was a much greater success than The Countess Cathleen, being in the manner of Ibsen, the manner of the moment”36 (Yeats (1955) 1980: 417).

London was also influential in terms of Dublin’s awareness of Ibsen through the crusading of William Archer and the efforts of an Irishman in exile, Shaw, and his fundamental book, The Quintessence of Ibsen (1891), which Joyce had read (JJ: 54). Shaw also strove, along with Eleanor Marx Aveling, to introduce Ibsen to the general public through socialist theatre groups in London in the mid-1880s (Levitas 2002: 10).

Joyce, then, was by no means a lone Ibsenite. Far from being a solitary voice in the wilderness he was, and as much as he might wish to deny it, making his contribution to the debate within the Irish literary revival. Just one among many ‘heretics’, he was not performing a monologue, much less a soliloquy, but really an oblique dialogue.37 As the young Joyce probably knew, Herford’s article was, in fact, a contribution to an on-going debate – that Joyce must have followed closely – in the Dublin edition of the

35

Irish Literary Society Gazette, March 1899, reproduced in Pierce 2000: 50.

36

Klaus Reichert mentions that Joyce also read Björnsen and Jacobsen, who were “very much en vogue, like everything Scandinavian at the turn of the century” (Reichert 1990: 77). Joyce had copies of their works in his library in Trieste (Ellmann 1977: 102, 114).

37

All the participants of the debate would undoubtedly have been intrigued if not, perhaps, surprised to read the actress Fiona Shaw’s recent comment that “when I went to play Hedda Gabler in Dublin, the gasps at her suicide showed that the audience did not know the play, a classic in Europe was new for Ireland” (Pilkington 2010: ix). Even allowing for inevitable generalisation, Shaw’s experience is a reflection of the place Ibsen’s work found in the memory of the general Irish theatre-going public.

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Daily Express, primarily between Yeats and W. K. Magee (who used the pseudonym

‘John Eglinton’ and is referred to as such in Ulysses)38. The argument centred on the choice of subject for national drama: contemporary lives or epic traditions? The “orchestrated discussion”, with Magee “self-consciously cosmopolitan” and Yeats “(for these purposes) jealously ‘Celtic’” (R. F. Foster 1997: 197-8) began on 18th Sept. 1898 and largely focussed on Ibsen and Wagner. This debate must have underscored the importance of Wagner and Ibsen for Joyce, as reflected in his early critical writings.

Joyce discovered Wagner at around the same time he discovered Ibsen and perhaps, initially, with even greater fervour. With his fine tenor voice, inherited from his father; his intermittent training, including piano lessons from when he was nine; and, as Stanislaus remembers, the fact that he got through his schoolwork as quickly as possible to be able to read opera scores (Martin 1991: 6); Joyce was arguably better prepared to receive the composer than the dramatist. Very little Wagner, however, was staged in Dublin before Joyce left in 1904 (except in selections), and his first opportunity to see one of the operas may only have been during one of his brief stays in Paris in 1903 (Ibid.: 15-16). This meant that, as with Ibsen, Joyce first met Wagner in the pages of a book, as something to be read primarily, either through scores and librettos, critical works or as absorbed in the writings of already converted Wagnerites, such as D’Annunzio in Il fuoco and Il Trionfo della morte. Timothy Martin also points out that Joyce began collecting “Wagnerian material” in 1899 and that by 1920 “[o]nly Shakespeare occupied more space on [his] shelves” (Ibid.: 18). As with The

Quintessence of Ibsen, Shaw was again a significant influence in the formation of

38

George 'AE' Russell, and the poet William Larminie also took part and, as part of the Irish Literary Revival’s promotional drive, the various articles were soon published in book form by Fisher Unwin, in May 1899, as Literary Ideals in Ireland.

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Joyce’s critical thinking. His copy of The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) “is heavily marked (…) with passages bracketed and difficult or unusual words underlined” (Ibid.: 11).

In an undated letter to August Roeckel (imprisoned after the 1849 revolt in Dresden, which also led to the composer’s exile), Wagner told his friend that, frustrated in Germany:

[He had felt] with my whole nature, both as man and artist, in absolute opposition to my work and my position, the only hope of deliverance was in a complete severance of my bonds. From the moment of that severance I felt that I had an important part to play; I realised that I was the only artist who as such had grasped the movement of the times. On this subject – i.e. on Art and its relation to life – I spoke out my views publicly as an author (…) and the constraint that I had to put on myself, had such a powerful influence on me and affected me so strongly that it brought on complete nervous prostration, and from that prostration I only recovered by a tremendous effort of will – a sort of act of desperation – which constrained me to turn my back on all my friends and to seek refuge amongst utter strangers (Wagner 1897: 44-46).

This must have been clearly attractive to the still young but future writer in exile, who would go on to write of an artist’s necessary “isolation” (SH: 34); and, when warned by Cranly that his vocation will lead to him being “[a]lone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend”, would answer: “I will take that risk” (P: 223). Wagner’s declaration could not have been far from his mind when, in March 1901, he praised the 73 year old Ibsen for his “absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths” as he “walked in the light of [his own] inward heroism” (SL: 7).

As we shall see further on, these two artists were fundamental influences on Joyce and, in terms of their artistic practice, established (we might say) Scylla and Charybdis-like polarities that he was to struggle between before achieving a form of artistic synthesis and severing his largely self-imposed bonds.

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Between January 1900 and October 1901, Joyce experienced the most creatively intense and varied contact with drama of his life, even bearing in mind the writing of

Exiles (1914-15) and his ultimately fraught time with the English players in Zurich

(1918-19).

In this period, he read his university paper “Drama and Life” on 20th Jan. 1900 and then published his article, “Ibsen’s New Drama” in The Fortnightly Review of 1st April 1900. In the following summer, he wrote his first play, A Brilliant Career39 and, probably still in 1900, at least started a second one, Dream Stuff. January 1901 saw him perform in Maggie Sheehy’s Cupid’s Confidante, at the Antient concert rooms and, during the summer, he produced his Hauptmann translations: Before Sunrise and

Michael Kramer. Despite some uncertainty as to the precise date, the “one Christmas”

when Joyce played Capt. Hawtree in T. W. Robertson’s Caste was probably around this time. The period drew to an appropriately dramatic close with his privately published and circulated article, “The Day of the Rabblement” in October 1901. Joyce was attempting to enter the new century with an even more resounding “Here’s me!”

“Drama and Life”, dated 10th Jan. 1900, was delivered to the Literary and Historical Society of what is now University College, Dublin on 20th January 1900, with Joyce approaching his 18th birthday. It was a belated response to a paper by another student, Arthur Clery, on February 11th 1899, whose subject was “The Theatre, Its Educational Value”. According to Ellmann, “[i]t was a mediocre discussion” in which Clery spoke of “the admitted deterioration of the modern stage”, and announced that “[t]he effect of Henrik Ibsen is evil.” He celebrated the Greeks and Macbeth, advocated revivals of Shakespeare’s plays in general, and considered that “in affecting and

39

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amusing us the proper end of the theatre should be to produce elevation.”40 If nothing else, these pronouncements “had the merit of annoying Joyce” (JJ: 70).

The paper was written seven months after the famous first Irish Literary Theatre season (featuring Yeats’ The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn’s Ibsenite The

Heather Field) and a month before the already announced second season in February

1900 (with George Moore’s The Bending of the Bough – which also owed something to the Norwegian dramatist – , Alice Milligan’s The Last Feast of the Fianna and Martyn’s

Maeve, a rather uneasy mixture of Ibsenite realism and Yeatsian symbolism). Joyce had

probably been encouraged by the production of a realistic play in the opening season and Moore’s play seemed to offer some hope in the next. In local terms, therefore, “Drama and Life” aimed to encourage Moore and Martyn, albeit obliquely, in what he saw as their attempt to “put life – real life – on the stage” and attack, less obliquely, Lady Gregory, Yeats and their followers, who presented “the world of faery” (OCPW: 28). Local terms, however, were not of paramount importance in the paper. 20th January 1900 might, more accurately, have been called his “Ibsen-Wagner night” as the most obvious feature of the paper is Joyce’s attempt to outline a critical theory based on Ibsen and Wagner as the “masons [who were] building for Drama, an ampler and loftier home” (Ibid.: 24).

As if to immediately contradict this idea of influence, however, Joyce begins his paper with an un-Wagnerian and un-Ibsenite dismissal of the Greeks and their restrictive conventions in which “[t]he conditions of the Attic stage suggested a syllabus of greenroom proprieties and cautions to authors, which in after ages were foolishly set up as the canons of dramatic art, in all lands (…) for good or bad, [Greek drama] has done its work (…) Its revival is not of dramatic but of pedagogical significance” (Ibid.:

40

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23). Norman Rhodes has written of Ibsen’s “veneration for the Greeks” (Rhodes 1995: 43) and Wagner had proclaimed “better to be for half a day a Greek in presence of this tragic Art-work than to all eternity an un-Greek god!”; going on to ask “[b]efore what phenomenon do we stand with more humiliating sense of the impotence of our frivolous culture, than before these Hellenes?” (Wagner (1849) 1895: 13, 18). Joyce, in his turn, presents the Greeks as an encumbrance rather than a model41.

The main thrust of the paper, however, is its emphasis on the individualism of the impersonal artist who, through his chosen form, “will be for the future at war with convention” with his “note being truth and freedom” (OCPW: 25) as he “forgoes his very self and stands a mediator in awful truth before the veiled face of God” (Ibid.: 26). Unlike literature, which “is a comparatively low form of art “and “flourishes through conventions in all human relations” (Ibid.: 25), “[d]rama has to do with the underlying laws first, in all their nakedness and divine severity, and only secondarily with the motley agents who bear them out” (Ibid.: 24).

Drama, then, focuses not on men and women in their particular social settings, but rather on the abstract forces at work below the social surface. This hardly appears to have much in common with what is commonly thought of as realism. According to Joyce, it is the “comparatively low” art form literature, not drama, which portrays human manners and morals in a particular situation, and at a certain time and place. The importance does not lie in the study of a specific society but in “changeless (…) underlying laws”. This seems a more Wagnerian than an Ibsenite view of the drama, even allowing for the symbolism often present in the dramatist’s work. Indeed, many of these ideas came directly from Joyce’s reading of Wagner. For the German artist, “[i]n Drama, Man is at once his own artistic ‘subject’ and his ‘stuff’, to his very fullest

41

Greek drama, epitomised by Eschylus (sic), was to receive no greater sympathy in Stephen Hero (SH: 89-90).

(49)

worth” (Wagner (1849) 1895: 28); whilst literature, with its “centuries of verse and prose, without once coming into the living world” was merely “the toilsome stammering of aphasia-smitten Thought” (Ibid.: 52)42. As for the idea of the impersonal artist, Wagner had also argued that the artist proves by the “surrender of his personality that he also, in his artistic action is obeying a dictate of Necessity which consumes the whole individuality of his being” (Ibid.: 96).

There are, however, some Wagnerian stances Joyce assumes that seem, in the light of his future work, more determinedly adopted than naturally his own43. For example, the view of tragedy as a “communal” art and drama stemming from a “common impulse” (Ibid.: 51, 53) lies behind Joyce’s “[d]rama is essentially a communal art and of widespread domain (…) its fittest vehicle almost presupposes an audience, drawn from all classes” (OCPW: 26). Although in May 1905, he claimed to Stanislaus that his “political opinions” were “those of a socialistic artist” (SL: 61)44, and later the shelves of his Trieste library “included especially books by socialists and anarchists” (JJ: 82); this pronouncement does not seem very much in keeping with the manner and practice of the young man who would shortly afterwards produce “The Day of the Rabblement”

42

This was later to be underlined in Stephen Hero, in which “Literature” was seen as “a term of contempt” (SH: 73).

43

In response to critics claiming he had not fully exploited the musical potential of Ulysses in his “musical play”, Blooms of Dublin, Anthony Burgess argued, in “A Prefatory Word”, that he “was concerned with a deliberate limitation – the exploitation of the basic narrative of the book as a demotic music-hall experience. I think Joyce himself might have been more sympathetic to this than to a Wagnerian enlargement” (Burgess 1986: 9).

44

In 1907, he would later tell his brother that he had “no wish to codify [himself] as anarchist or socialist or reactionary” (SL: 152). In 1904, however, Stanislaus had recorded that “Jim boasts (…) of being modern. He calls himself a socialist but attaches himself to no school of socialism” (DD: 49).

Theatrical Joyce

Theatrical Joyce

David Michael Greer

Theatrical Joyce

David Michael Greer

Tese orientada por

Prof. Doutora Maria Helena Serôdio

e Dr. Sam Slote

Abstract

Resumo

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1. The Play’s the Thing